Concerns regarding financing for foreign students
Romanian organisation defrauds DUO and Romanian students
Photo: pxhere
The UKrant article is headlined “Romanian NGO runs DUO scam”. But Romanian students themselves have also been duped in their dealings with GCRS, a shady organisation that promised to help them secure student financing in the Netherlands.
The fraud works as follows: The student’s family "donates" a sum of money to GCRS, which then transfers the funds to the student, supposedly as payment for freelance journalism work. That “income” allows the recipient to apply to the Education Executive Agency (DUO) for financing. The student then transfers the money from GCRS back to their own family, who can use it to make another donation to the organisation, and so on. The trick was uncovered by Romanian journalists from the news website PressOne.
A number of Romanian students told UKrant how they were scammed. The scheme worked smoothly for a while but, at a certain point, GCRS stopped paying them. The students and their relatives lost the money they had transferred. According to the organisation, the payments had merely been delayed due to unspecified “circumstances”.
Numbers
According to the latest figures, 6,700 Romanians are studying in the Netherlands, of whom 5,700 are undergraduates. Only Germany and Italy send more international students to the Netherlands.
The number of Romanian students enrolled in Dutch universities and universities of applied sciences has been rising for several years. In 2015, there were just 1,600 of them. Romania ranked tenth in the list of countries of origin.
Parliamentary questions
MP Pieter Omtzigt has submitted written parliamentary questions to the government about these revelations. One of the things he wants to know about is how many Romanian students have been receiving student financing in the Netherlands thanks to GCRS.
Omtzigt has long been concerned about easily foreign students secure entitlement to a Dutch basic grant and other forms of student financing, which is why he would like the government to take preventive measures. But that will not be easy due to European rules related to freedom of movement.